I truly had hoped that, in his first address as president to Congress, and hence to the nation, that Biden was going to say very clearly, “I want to say to the American people, and particularly to the millions of working and middle class Americans whose lives and livelihoods have been undermined by 40 years of “Trickle -Down economics,” — what some people call “Neoloiberalism” — that we Democrats were wrong to go along with these Republican-initiated policies. I stand before you because we have seen the error of our ways. And I’m here to pledge to you that everything we do in this administration will be dedicated to making this right by you. We will be dedicated to returning to you the American Promise that when we work hard, when we do our jobs, we are valued and are rewarded fairly — and that the corporations and institutions that are essential to the well-being of our families and our communities are dong their part.” EYC.
And then, when the Dems tried to simply do more within the Regan Dispensation and workers weren’t “feeling it,” this might have spurred some sense of ‘agency’ among the working/middle class that would lead to new thinking and new approaches, or at least really good, public fights about these things, that might have brought to the fore in our public discourses the real reasons for the resentment and anger of the working and middle class. Perhaps this could have made the 2024 election about these things rather than about amorphous feelings about inflation and transgender issues . . .
It's very difficult to make politics go backwards, because the same process that lead to what you call a dispensation continues during the dispensation. That is, today's democrats are still fighting on the minority rights and progressive economics that lost to Reagan. When Biden came in and attempted to weakly revive those progressive policies, the result was a solid electoral loss. In order for democrats to create a new economic order, they need to identify new economic or political theory that can improve people's daily lives. Picketty etc cannot be the answer because they want to bring back the same policies that failed and brought in Reagan. My opinion is that the economic theory that will work is voluntarism, also known as rothbardian ancap. There are strong theoretical reasons to believe those policies would work, and they are also impossible for Republicans due to their social conservatism and corporate control. A democratic party that adopted voluntarism instead of progressivism would create a new dispensation.
The issue in 1980 was inflation. Reagan encapsuled it in his misery index, which was the sum of unemployment and inflation rates. In 1980 this was 20.7, in 1983 it was 11.8. This structured the answer to Reagan 1984 pitch, are you better off now that four years ago, to which the answer was clearly "yes". Reagan went on to win in a landslide.
Now if you look at the components you will see than unemployment in 1984 was 7.5%, slightly *higher* than the 7.2% it had been in 1980. But inflation in 1984 was 4.4% compared to 13.5%. It was all inflation. The effect was *very* noticeable, I lived through it. It was nothing like today, when the inflation issue is mostly just smoke.
The issue today *isn't* inflation, or unemployment or really any specific thing. It's that we simply don't see things like what we saw in the 1980's, a president running to do something about a real tangible problem and then actually *doing* something about it.
Today, no matter who gets elected, nothing happens. The reason is the dispensation is too old. They all fail eventually, and a new one is needed. To problem is the dispensation affects how one thinks about the issues. Your proposed solution is a stronger application of the Reagan dispensation. And on the Democratic side you have either the moderates who call for Clinton-style preemptive policy, or Progressives who call for "woke" dressing applied to Obama-style preemption (which is what Biden did). Neither of these will work either. So the parties now trade off every term.
I truly had hoped that, in his first address as president to Congress, and hence to the nation, that Biden was going to say very clearly, “I want to say to the American people, and particularly to the millions of working and middle class Americans whose lives and livelihoods have been undermined by 40 years of “Trickle -Down economics,” — what some people call “Neoloiberalism” — that we Democrats were wrong to go along with these Republican-initiated policies. I stand before you because we have seen the error of our ways. And I’m here to pledge to you that everything we do in this administration will be dedicated to making this right by you. We will be dedicated to returning to you the American Promise that when we work hard, when we do our jobs, we are valued and are rewarded fairly — and that the corporations and institutions that are essential to the well-being of our families and our communities are dong their part.” EYC.
And then, when the Dems tried to simply do more within the Regan Dispensation and workers weren’t “feeling it,” this might have spurred some sense of ‘agency’ among the working/middle class that would lead to new thinking and new approaches, or at least really good, public fights about these things, that might have brought to the fore in our public discourses the real reasons for the resentment and anger of the working and middle class. Perhaps this could have made the 2024 election about these things rather than about amorphous feelings about inflation and transgender issues . . .
It's very difficult to make politics go backwards, because the same process that lead to what you call a dispensation continues during the dispensation. That is, today's democrats are still fighting on the minority rights and progressive economics that lost to Reagan. When Biden came in and attempted to weakly revive those progressive policies, the result was a solid electoral loss. In order for democrats to create a new economic order, they need to identify new economic or political theory that can improve people's daily lives. Picketty etc cannot be the answer because they want to bring back the same policies that failed and brought in Reagan. My opinion is that the economic theory that will work is voluntarism, also known as rothbardian ancap. There are strong theoretical reasons to believe those policies would work, and they are also impossible for Republicans due to their social conservatism and corporate control. A democratic party that adopted voluntarism instead of progressivism would create a new dispensation.
The issue in 1980 was inflation. Reagan encapsuled it in his misery index, which was the sum of unemployment and inflation rates. In 1980 this was 20.7, in 1983 it was 11.8. This structured the answer to Reagan 1984 pitch, are you better off now that four years ago, to which the answer was clearly "yes". Reagan went on to win in a landslide.
Now if you look at the components you will see than unemployment in 1984 was 7.5%, slightly *higher* than the 7.2% it had been in 1980. But inflation in 1984 was 4.4% compared to 13.5%. It was all inflation. The effect was *very* noticeable, I lived through it. It was nothing like today, when the inflation issue is mostly just smoke.
The issue today *isn't* inflation, or unemployment or really any specific thing. It's that we simply don't see things like what we saw in the 1980's, a president running to do something about a real tangible problem and then actually *doing* something about it.
Today, no matter who gets elected, nothing happens. The reason is the dispensation is too old. They all fail eventually, and a new one is needed. To problem is the dispensation affects how one thinks about the issues. Your proposed solution is a stronger application of the Reagan dispensation. And on the Democratic side you have either the moderates who call for Clinton-style preemptive policy, or Progressives who call for "woke" dressing applied to Obama-style preemption (which is what Biden did). Neither of these will work either. So the parties now trade off every term.